Rhythm in the Blues | Group Exhibition | London

12 – 20 May 2026

14 Percy Street, Fitzrovia, London

Presented by Octavia Art Gallery (New Orleans) and Julia Campbell Carter

Rhythm in the Blues

Rhythm, migration, memory and place

AIGANYM GALI · ALIA ALI · AZADEH GHOTBI · NAOMIE KREMER · LUCILLE LEWIN

ARAL I | 200 x 200 cm | Acrylic, Oil On Canvas | 2015

Rhythm in the Blues brought five artists to 14 Percy Street in Fitzrovia from 12 to 20 May 2026. It was presented by Pamela Bryan, founder of Octavia Art Gallery in New Orleans, and Julia Campbell Carter, the London curator and art advisor, as an exchange between two cities with layered musical histories. The title borrows from rhythm and blues, a music shaped by movement, resilience and lived experience; the artists took rhythm as both structure and inheritance, a way into migration, memory and place.

Aiganym Gali showed alongside Alia Ali, a Jameel Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, whose practice spans photography, textiles and sculpture; Azadeh Ghotbi, a London-based painter of gestural abstraction; Naomie Kremer, whose work is held by the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the sculptor Lucille Lewin, who works in porcelain.

TAN ATA | 180 x 120 cm | Acrylic, Oil On Canvas | 2014

Gali described the paintings she brought as works that “continue my exploration of light, space, atmosphere and inner landscape”. She showed three Steppe paintings, TAN ATA (2014), ARAL I (2015) and KOK DALA (2025), with two new works in acrylic, oil and gold leaf, ORDA (KIZIL) and ORDA (KOK) (2026).

Writing on the exhibition, Artlyst likened her colour and atmospheric forms to musical improvisation, “the canvas becoming a kind of score”. In Art Plugged, Julia Campbell Carter spoke of “Gali’s luminous paintings, drawn from ancient Eurasian cosmologies”. The exhibition was also covered by Trebuchet and The Wick.